Upgraded the site engine to Drupal 5.x this month, and updated/redesigned the front-end theme. For the redesign I decided to turn it down a notch. This is the third design for stevenread.com. The previous designs were almost horrible... so to be safe this one pretends that it no longer has a design. I began trying this minimal, off-white, gallery-wall browser style in 2004 with my Photo Noise piece, and more recently was inspired by some artist sites like Damon Zucconi's. Been using Drupal CMS for my website since 2006 when my brother Dan talked me into it. As a software engineer I've been designing/building web content management systems (CMS) for years, even a few from scratch, so I thought finally time to have one for myself! Very safe to say that having/using a CMS tool can greatly affect one's art practice. Moving on... I have ended the 'Conclusivity Blog' which was primarily a net art sketchbook project. I realized that I am not a net artist because I believe successful net artists are good electronic communicators, gregarious even, and these traits usually affect the net art being made. I am a neither of these and don't aspire to be, so I guess I am just a regular artist. For a while I was making net art 'about' bad communication and anti-networking, but it seemed like a weird path for me. Anyhow this new 'Read News' blog will be start out more utilitarian than the last. I also officially downgraded my name back to 'Steve Or Steven Read' which I originally started using in 2004. In 2006 I upgraded this pattern based name to 'Ste(v|ph)en? Re[aei]d' which was regular-expression compliant and allowed for 12 different spellings of my name. That name is officially deprecated, please do not use it. Steve Read, Steven Read, Steve Or Steven Read, and sometimes Steven Fucking Read are the current names which refer to me. All in all it feels great to have some things refreshed at the start of the summer of 2008.